SUMMER KIM LEE
for a community. I say this knowing it makes me come off as self-centered, as a bad political subject complicit with liberal fantasies of individualism, one seemingly not down for the greater good and cause, a compromised critic and academic. For critics and academics, especially when queer and/or of color, one’s political desires for representation seen as springing from one’s identity are crucial to one’s reading and writing practice at the same time that they are understood to deter or jeopardize one’s skills and critical capacity as such. Such political desires mean one speaks on behalf of that same community, as Oh says, but not too much or else personal feelings and investments will undermine the validity of one’s critique. Likewise, Eve is a character whose queer desires, the ambiguities around identification as/with Villanelle, lead her to getting the job, but get in the way of her ability to do her job the right way – the right way being that which keeps in mind the larger picture, beyond Villanelle. What Oh conveys in Eve is a dissatisfaction, a boredom, and moreover a longing for Villanelle and her pleasure in killing, as well as in flirtation and sex. In the first season’s final scene, these pleasures become indistinguishable from one another as Eve and Villanelle become entangled with each other in a bed with sheets, blood, a knife, and champagne. Eve’s longing and her inability to act on it or follow through – which is to say, both her inability to have sex with Villanelle and her inability to kill her – is what makes her an agent with questionable intentions. There is then a way that the compromised scholar and writer, “too close to your objects,” is like Eve, the compromised agent in bed with the enemy, too infatuated and interested in her suspect to have the distance
assumed necessary to catch the criminal, to make political critiques. To be compromised is to be too involved and too close to one’s objects in pursuit. It is to perhaps willfully cultivate forms of clouded judgement and irresponsible, shallow desires that shape a compromised political subject position, one that does not let representation wholly organize one’s politics and sense of community and collectivity, but nevertheless lets it feel good when it can. I am not making a case for some kind of optimistic, individualistic approach to representation. I still am wary and weary of it and the version of identity politics it can promote. Instead, in my compromised position, I sit with what feels good about Oh’s work, the representations she gives us, and my identification as/with them, without calling them guilty pleasures or pleasurably bad objects. This is my own way of admitting that, like Eve, I’m just a fan and that all of this just interested me, I guess.
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